“Up to this time she had been quiet and passive, bearing her fate with a sort of dumb resignation; but now a spirit of vengeance, fiercer and more terrible than his own, began to kindle within her; and, kneeling down before the ghastly thing, she breathed a wish--a prayer--to the avenging Jehovah, so unutterably horrible, that even her husband had to fly with curdling blood from the room. That dreadful prayer was heard--that wish fulfilled in me; but long before I looked on the light of day that frantic woman had repented of the awful deed she had done. Repentance came too late the sin of the father was visited on the child, and on the mother, too, for the moment her eyes fell upon me, she became a raving maniac, and died before the first day of my life had ended. “Nurse and physician fled at the sight of me; but my father, though thrilling with horror, bore the shock, and bowed to the retributive justice of the angry Deity she had invoked. His whole life, his whole nature, changed from that hour; and, kneeling beside my dead mother, as he afterward told me, he vowed before high Heaven to cherish and love me, even as though I had not been the ghastly creature I was. The physician he bound by a terrible oath to silence; the nurse he forced back, and, in spite of her disgust and abhorrence, compelled her to nurse and care for me. The dead was buried out of sight; and we had rooms in a distant part of the house, which no one ever entered but my father and the nurse. Though set apart from my birth as something accursed, I had the intellect and capacity of--yes, far greater intellect and capacity than, most children; and, as years passed by, my father, true to his vow, became himself my tutor and companion. He did not love me--that was an utter impossibility; but time so blunts the edge of all things, that even the nurse became reconciled to me, and my father could scarcely do less than a stranger. So I was cared for, and instructed, and educated; and, knowing not what a monstrosity I was, I loved them both ardently, and lived on happily enough, in my splendid prison, for my first ten years in this world.